User:Tarnoob

(I also have a user page on Polish Wikipedia.)

Interests
(with some digressions on my related views; I hope it doesn’t break the relevant policy.)

General
Disclaimer: I mention here many disciplines, but I don’t claim any contribution to them or any expertise. Among academics, „being interested in” sometimes means „doing research in”, but here I’m only saying what topics can absorb me if someone wants to contact me about them.

I’m an enthusiast of many topics. The more academic ones are:
 * Physics with Astronomy;
 * Maths (yes, my English is more British than Canmerican);
 * Philosophy & religion;
 * Linguistics, typography & editing;
 * Politics;
 * Vexillology, which I prefer to call vexillistics – to be consistently Latin.

The less academic ones are:
 * Fashion & image, especially men’s;
 * Etiquette, including political correctness;
 * Fantasy, especially the Might and Magic franchise; my nickname emerged in this fandom about 2008;
 * Sci-fi, especially the cyberpunk genre, especially the Matrix franchise;
 * music; I know, that’s not very surprising; my favourite genres probably aren’t too original either: synthwave, minimalism, power metal, film music, game music, pop-hits.

A topic which is somehow interwoven with those above is queer studies. It’s interesting to learn the whole lingo, symbolism & rules of communication related to this.

Physics
In Physics, I’m interested more in theory than in experiment; mostly in:
 * relativity and gravity; I wish the term gravitology was more common; I know it's a Latin-Greek blend like sociology or television, but the purely Greek name bariology is already taken by research on overweight;
 * quantum foundations;
 * metrology;
 * climate change;
 * history & philosophy of Physics; maybe it could be called physicosophy, just like philosophy of history is sometimes called historiosophy;
 * Physics education & popularization (or, communication).

I wish one day I can do research in one of these topics, or maybe in statistical mechanics, which is also fundamental & has some philosophical aspect to it. I do keep eye on a yet another fundamental field, i.e. particle Physics, but for many reasons it’s not in my main focus. I’m almost a total layman in condensed matter, lasers & similar technological areas; so if you think that an article about it needs some attention, it’s probably better to ask someone else.

Maths
It’s probably no surprise that I’m interested mostly in those areas which are most closely related to Physics; i.e.: I’m a layman in:
 * Analysis with Calculus (which is arguably more of an algebraic theory), including differential equations,
 * Linear Algebra,
 * Group Theory,
 * some probability,
 * statistics,
 * numerical analysis.
 * synthetic geometry,
 * number theory,
 * graph theory,
 * combinatorics,
 * some areas of abstract algebra like rings, fields & lattices,
 * game theory,
 * algorithms,
 * foundations of maths, i.e. logic & set theory, apart from:
 * the very basic level used all over the place,
 * some popular-scientific or historical fun-facts.

However, I occasionally jump into areas unrelated to Physics like psephology, i.e. voting theory.

I believe that Linear Algebra is usually taught incorrectly and even pretty good courses – like the one by Jim Hefferon on Wikibooks – share some of the common problems. This is why on Wikimedian projects I pay some attention to such content; I believe that the role model for such courses is Banchoff’s & Wermer’s Linear algebra through geometry, at least at the total beginnner’s level. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything similar on a bit more advanced level, like the general Euclidean space. Sheldon Axler’s Linear algebra done right is very valuable with its alternative perspective, but I may have some reservations, and it’s on a relatively advanced level. If anyone knows something like B&W, but in ℝn (or $$\R^n$$, if your TeX render works better than Unicode), I’d be very grateful for letting me know.

Philosophy
It’s probably no surprise that I’m interested mostly in areas related to my other interests, like Philosophy of Science or Philosophy of Mathematics. One of my favourite philosophers is probably G.W. Leibniz, who kinda wrote mystical cyberpunk some 300 years before it was cool. Also, on Wikipedias I’ve written about Michał Heller, a philosopher among many of his occupations. It was very kind of Wikimedia Foundation’s blog to invite me to write about this; the post now looks odd to me, but maybe my English simply was that bad back in 2017.

One of my bigger contributions to Polish Wikipedia was adding links to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This is a never-ending story, because these encyclopedias have new articles being added all the time & the old ones are being updated, so some info in existing links has to be changed too. It can be hard to follow, so I encourage anyone – even without any interest in Philosopy – to update these links if possible, by following the news on the relevant websites. It can be done relatively easily even by laymen in the field.

I believe it’s important in a world which owes pretty much to Philosphy and yet sometimes fools itself with some nonsense about it, spoken out even by some top-tier researchers and public intellectuals; as summarized pretty well by Sean M. Carroll. Maybe it will be less common if more people realise that SEP, IEP or academic philosphers (like, say, Heller or Peter Singer) often write about topics like ethics, politics or hard science, because it’s pretty bold to belittle these topics. I guess that these are often provocations, e.g. in the case of Stephen Hawking. I’d ignore them if they weren’t sometimes taken seriously – especially by laymen – or even desperately defended by people like Lawrence Krauss. I don’t expect anyone to share my interests; I just expect people to be consistent – if you don’t care about Philosphy, please don’t pretend an authority on it; you can fool yourself and mislead some people, pulling them into darkness. I’m happy that some science communicators don’t indulge in such provocations, or even have some philosophical sensitivity & training; at least in Physics (Carlo Rovelli), Biology (Massimo Pigliucci) or Neuroscience (Daniel Dennett).

Aside from these science-related topics, I’m interested in antinatalism and Philosophy of religion, so maybe I’ll edit articles on these topics, too. If you’d like to discuss it or add something about it on Wikipedia, feel free to let me know; I may be watching my watchlist not often enough.

Standards in English
You could’ve noticed that I used a z in popularization, even though I said that my English is generally British. This is no mistake – I support the Oxford spelling; I like the Oxford comma too. Unfortunately, Oxford University Press seems to recommend the em dash (—), which I prefer to leave for dialogues or decorations of unformatted text. Also, UK publishers in general tend to use ‘single quotation marks’ by default, which I don’t like, because they’re so easy to confuse with apostrophes, so common in English; I use “double quotation marks” instead, as it is common in the US. I hope my mixed spelling & punctuation is no problem – I don’t use it in the main namespace, where I believe the articles should be consistent with existing standards. I believe that Wikipedia articles should have clear labels of what variety of English they're using; there is something similar for templates, and maybe the main namespace articles should have something in the top-right corner of the page.

Yes, I’m an awful, classist & ableist prescriptivist – I mean, apart from protecting informal language, I also protect the literary standard, which some descriptivists are surprisingly keen to fight against. I don’t have a problem with some degree of diglossia. I can be a Grammar Nazi if I wish, or even a typography nazi, making even other grammar nazis annoyed with my criticism. Also, I believe that political correctness is a form of prescriptivism too – and it’s an example of good prescriptivism.

However, every cloud has a silver lining and such quirks have their pros, e.g. in Wikipedia editing. As I say in another section, I’m a Wikignome, very happy to correct spelling & punctuation, and I’m very happy to be corrected myself.

Rare & new words
I love learning rare words and promoting them; like Canmerica, gravitology, psysicosophy or psephology already used on this page. I also invent my own ones, i.e. neologisms or protologisms; tens so far as of September 2020. Some are pretty academic, like exofunction (a mathematical function between different sets; f:X→Y, X ≠ Y); but some are completely universal and they can be jokes, like:
 * hetman in the sense of a straight man, or
 * BACH in the sense of a binary allo-cis-het. This is probably a precise acronym for someone non-queer; cis-hets can be queer or LGBT+ IMO.

Feel free to comment on my inventions or to share other rare words with me, both in English and in Polish – or even in other languages, because I believe there’s plenty of room for loanwords.

Conlangs
I have a thing for constructed languages, especially international auxiliary languages. As a teenager (about the age 13–18) I used to be an esperantist, but thanks to many people, since about 2017 I’m a heavy critic of this movement. However, I do support esperantology and even learning this language – or similar failures like Volapük – for the purpose of research, diversity & preservation of some heritage, although they’re not my taste.

On the other hand, I do see some potential in related projects like Ido, Interlingua, Glosa or Elefen. This potential may be educational, or it can be purely a potential to create a global network of hobbyist, analogous to the one already established by Esperanto or some other conlangs. These four languages seem to be good enough for these purposes. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have enough time to dive into them; or rather, I’m lucky to have enough motivation for other, possibly more valuable hobbies, like editing Wikipedia.

Varia
On Wikimedia projects, I’m a strict WikiGnome – instead of making new articles in the main namespace, I focus on improving the existing ones, e.g. by categorization, making sections & links. Most of my Wikimedian experience is on Polish Wikipedia, where I’ve been one of the editors since 2016 or ’17.

Personally, I’m a Physics degree dropout from Poland, Europe. Yes, I add the continent, because I believe people outside Europe usually don’t have to know where Poland is, if it’s an independent country, or that it exists at all. Its population & economy make it far less important globally than, say, Indonesia, Pakistan or Bangladesh, which may be poorly known outside Asia. Also, I have some support for international institutions like the EU or the Council of Europe; the latter could change its name & flag, by the way.

I’m a doomer and a proud Old Alleynian. I’m not sure if my pedantry, interests & pretentious language are a result of autism spectrum, OCD, OCPD, STPD or something else. Feel free to call me neurodiverse.